In recent years it has become readily apparent that there is a finite quanitity of fossil fuel available for future use and that the cost of such fuel is increasing and will continue to increase for the forseeable future. While alternative energy sources are and will probably continue to be developed, substitutes for fossil fuel cannot be relied upon as a total or even significant, alternative in the near future. Thus, it has become extremely important to improve the efficiency of existing and newly installed heating and process systems which employ fossil fuel.
Large commercial installations of an industrial type are sometimes instrumented and provided with complex control systems which permit operating characteristics of those systems to be observed and optimized. However, there are thousands of furnace and boiler systems in the United States and other countries in private homes, multiple family dwellings and commercial establishments which use a significant quanitity of fuel and which have substantially no equipment to permit efficiency evaluation. While great attention has been paid to more efficient use of the systems on a time basis through more sophisticated thermostatic control of the spaces being heated, and while considerable attention has been paid to more effective insulation and the like, there remains no dynamic real-time technique for evaluating the efficient use of the fuel in the combustion process itself. Furthermore, existing systems of an industrial type are not readily adaptable to smaller furnace or boiler use and are, generally, far too expensive to be economically justifiable, even in the face of increasing fuel costs.